Ukraine: Why didn’t the U.S. know sooner?

Even New Yorker editor David Remnick — a veteran Russia expert who won widespread accolades for his TV commentary during the Sochi Olympics — said less than a week ago that he found it hard to fathom that Putin would react to the crisis by moving forces into Ukraine.

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“We may be back here in two weeks or three weeks or something, God forbid, and I could be wrong, but I find it very hard to believe that Russia would send troops into Ukraine,” Remnick said Feb. 26 on PBS’s “Charlie Rose Show.” “Toward what end would it be? I just don’t know….Who are you fighting? What are you fighting for?”

Writing for his own magazine on Saturday, Remnick acknowledged that his initial take was off the mark.

“Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West,” he observed in a web post ominously entitled “Putin Goes to War.” “Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse.”

Former CIA analyst Helima Croft wisely suggested in an interview last week that the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 offered reason to be concerned about a similar action in Ukraine, but went on to predict that such a move was unlikely.

“No one expects right now Russian intervention, but with the military exercises yesterday, what happened in Georgia: that’s always in the back of people’s minds,” she told Bloomberg TV Thursday. “Right now, the Russians are coming off a pretty successful Olympics. I mean I don’t think the Russians want to provoke this type of international incident.”

This wouldn’t be the first time pundits spouted conventional wisdom off the mark. But it would also not be an isolated event if the U.S. intelligence community seriously misjudged the Ukraine situation.

In the past decade or so, U.S. intelligence agencies have chalked up an impressive list of oversights and errors including the failure to detect the September 11, 2001, attacks, the botched assessment of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the failure to foresee the Arab Spring.

With respect to Russia and Putin specifically, that 2008 invasion of Georgia caught many U.S. officials by surprise and spurred questions even then about U.S. insights into Russian decision-making.

Several former intelligence officials say part of the problem is that the U.S. intelligence community’s intense focus on Russia that developed during the Cold War has eroded due to budget cuts in the 1990s and resources diverted to the fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“They stopped spying on Russia,” former CIA operative Bob Baer said.

The shift towards analyzing “big data” sets and tapping the Internet has also meant less focus on old-fashioned spying using covert agents and sources.

“I guarantee Putin wasn’t on Facebook working through this in his mind,” Baer said. “He wasn’t on Twitter. And he wasn’t on his cell phone…. The only way to know in advance about planning for an invasion like this is to have someone in a military office at the Kremlin. There are people like that. The CIA used to recruit people like that.”

The CIA denied that the focus on terrorism has hobbled the agency’s intelligence gathering in other areas, like Russia. “Although we do not talk about our specific intelligence efforts, the agency is a versatile global organization that is more than capable of addressing a range of national security threats simultaneously and it does so every day. Anyone suggesting otherwise is seriously misinformed,” said agency spokesman Dean Boyd.

Undoubtedly, there have been many significant U.S. intelligence successes in recent years, including the pinpointing of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. But the public list of failures is also weighty, and raises questions about what the U.S. gets for its roughly $70 billion a year in intelligence spending.

Some former agency officials say it’s inconceivable that policymakers were blindsided by the idea of a Russian military incursion.

“I would expect there were no set-in-stone predictions that any U.S. government agency were making about this sort of thing. They would be stupid to do so if they did,” said Georgetown University’s Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official. “The ‘warning’ business, the way it is used in intelligence, refers to things that have no more than a 30 percent or 40 percent chance of happening, but a significant enough chance that policy makers and planners need to think about it.”

And events could have changed Putin’s thinking in recent weeks, making his plans a kind of moving target. It’s at least possible that Obama’s public statement last Friday warning Putin that “there will be costs” for Russian military action in Ukraine may have served as a kind of challenge that only egged on the Russian leader, the intelligence veteran said.

“It is impossible for anyone inside or outside government to game out all of these variables that can affect a decision of a foreign leader,” Pillar said. “We are often talking about decisions not yet made… on the basis of circumstances that might not yet have developed.”

“In Ukraine, it’s reasonable to assume [U.S.] leaders are getting a very clear picture of the distribution of forces in the region, which is a big deal,” said the Federation of American Scientists’ Steven Aftergood. “I would be hesitant to draw very far-reaching conclusions, except to say that we’re learning from experience what intelligence can and cannot offer. It is not a crystal ball. It is not free from error.”

Intelligence officials conceded that they had not paid close enough attention to social media postings that could have signaled the growing unrest.

However, then-CIA director Leon Panetta said the toughest task the intelligence community faces is predicting what a leader will choose to do — like when protests prompted Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia in January 2011.

“The most difficult thing is to get into the head of somebody and try to figure out what that person’s going to decide,” Panetta told a congressional panel. “We have that problem with the leaders in Iran, in Korea — North Korea — and clearly, with Ben Ali, the same issue. How do you get into someone’s head when they make the decision to get out of the country?”